Traffic congestion on road networks is nothing but slower speeds, increased trip time and increased queuing of the vehicles. When the number of vehicles exceeds the capacity of the road, traffic congestion occurs. In the metropolitan cities across the world traffic congestion is a major problem. Traffic congestion is caused when the demand exceeds the available road capacity. There are various reasons which lead to traffic congestion such as failure of signals, poor law enforcement and bad traffic management. One of the major problems with the present traffic system and management across the world is that the existing traffic system cannot be expanded any more. Traffic congestion for any country may lead to negative impact on economy, environment and overall quality of life and developments of the people. The only possible practical option available is to try and implement better management with the existing traffic systems and methods.
There are various conventional systems and methods available for traffic management such as traffic signals are located on roadways to control the flow of traffic through intersections and other areas. A typical traffic signal includes three intervals—a red interval, a green interval, and a yellow interval. With the sustained and rapid economic development across the world, the number of vehicles on roads are increasing dramatically, growing urban road congestion, and thereby traffic congestion has become an international issue. A typical driver spends significant time idling in traffic congestion. Air pollution and energy consumption is becoming more serious due to exhaust gases emitted during the idling of vehicles waiting for traffic signals to change. Furthermore, a lot of this time is spent idling behind traffic signals.
To cope with the traffic congestion problems, multi-level crossings including overpasses and underpasses have been conventionally constructed. However, construction of such alternative crossing structures suffers from various disadvantages such as enormous construction costs, significant maintenance and management expenses, and detrimental effects on the beauty of cities.
According to the traditional four phased traffic signal design, a vehicle in any particular arm has to wait for the other three arms to turn off in order to pass the crossing. If each signal possesses a waiting time of 1 minute, the total waiting time duration sums up to 3 minutes.
Therefore, there exists a need to improve the traffic signalling system and method which can be implemented to improve the flow of traffic smoothly with minimum waiting time for a vehicle at any traffic signal.
Therefore, the present invention has been conceived in view of overcoming the drawbacks discussed above, and it is an object of the present invention to provide an intersection system which is capable of achieving smooth vehicular traffic flow at intersections by simplification of a traffic signal system into a two-phase signal system and is also capable of significantly increasing traffic capacity of intersections by reduction of waiting time.